A look on what was the forefront of the internet, from simple message boards to 4chan, and later became common, like the cheezburger networks. Emphasizes the creativity and in some senses meritocracy that the internet has encouraged. Largely refrains from moralizing. ( )

Looking for a book, as I was, to explain internet culture to your mom? This will probably fit the bill. Not a lot of new information to anyone who has spent any amount of time poking around the internet, but then that's not why I picked it up. I've seen some valid criticism of this book floating around: large chunks seem cut and pasted, there is little original content, and there is something sort of inherently shitty about someone taking a bunch of free, not for profit content generated by others, compressing it into a book, and selling it. If it's any consolation, a book project like this (small print run, mid range publisher) is not exactly a fast track to fortune. It'll probably keep Stryker in tacos for a year, if he's lucky. And despite the opportunistic nature of the project and Stryker's unfortunate tendency to sound a little snide, some genuine idealism shines through. It's clear that Stryker really wants to communicate to a non-internet addicted audience what is so beautiful and so horrifying about the internet, and that what's really important is fighting for our freedom to express ourselves either way. It would have been nice if this book had delved a little more into the ethos of geek culture but whatever. There are other sources for that. And the trip down meme memory lane was really quite enjoyable.
So, in short, I think my parents, and people like them, who are baffled by alarmist news specials about legions of unhinged hackers lurking around the internet causing random mayhem, will learn a lot, which is all I really hoped for from this book. ( )

This book is more a book for n00bs looking for information on the creation and propagation of memes. There is very little coverage about Anonymous and even less on 4chan. Any 4chan mention is always as a backdrop and stated in such a way as to imply that 4chan is one of the primary "breeding grounds" for memes.

If you're looking for a book about 4chan you will be disappointed. Where the book has any merit is the later pages, which discuss Anonymous and its activities. Significant discussion of those activities, their merit, and potential motivation are the capstone to this book.

I grabbed this monograph out of curiosity for how 4chan would be portrayed. It wasn't. ( )

There’s a lot of this book that’s not really about 4chan or Anonymous, but about the development of unmoderated or awfulness-seeking sites on the web. The book makes for a primary document in its own right, insofar as it shows how someone can recognize how hostile certain spaces are to women and still not connect that with his own judgments about those spaces’ “importance.” Stryker contends that 4Chan is the source of most web memes and therefore the most fascinating place on the web. Maybe a biographer often buys into a subject’s own narrative.

I’m more interested in the gender stuff: Stryker reports that there aren’t many women on 4chan (how we know this is unclear, but I’m not arguing) and that it’s pretty hostile to women, except for female cosplayers and for visitors to /cm (Cute/Male anime, separate from the main Cute anime board—which does clearly reflect the marked status of women). So “[t]he 4chan adage ‘There are no girls on the Internet’ suggests that anyone claiming to be a woman is actually a man either trolling or getting a sexual thrill out of posting as a woman,” and women who post pictures of themselves get encouraged to strip, so that “4chan’s relationship with women is weird and sad.” But not 4chan’s users? Or only when they’re on 4chan? He also says that yaoi is naked male anime but yuri is femslash; this may be true of how 4chan boards define the terms, but somebody is a little nervous about anime guys having sex with other guys. 4chan also revels in the use of offensive terms, and Stryker has a good conversation with Lisa Nakamura about the thrill of shock value and the desire not to be held responsible for consequences of racist and sexist abuse. She says, “A lot of disenfranchised, disaffected white people feel like they’re also fighting the man, they’re also on the edges, but in some really important way they are not.” He says, in response, that homosexuality is much more accepted on 4chan than non-whiteness, while by contrast the US in general has “gotten over its fear of racial minorities to a much larger degree than its fear of gays”; I wonder how he knows this.

Getting back to the most interesting place on the web: Stryker is surprised to find out that the founder of Encyclopedia Dramatica, which cataloged some of 4chan’s greatest hits, has zero interest in 4chan. She founded it to document Livejournal drama, which he then discusses for a couple of pages and then leaves behind. This underscores just how much this is a book about what (some) men find interesting and important; Stryker doesn’t seem to get that some people’s narratives start and end in different places, and seems bemused by the ED founder’s claim that she really only cared about LJ.

The book ends with broader discussion about anonymity versus identifiability on the web, and as usual there’s short shrift given to persistent pseudonyms/autonyms that aren’t connected with government ID. Stryker is supportive of anonymity; as 4chan’s founder says, it’s a way to fail and not be stuck with the consequences of that failure forever, something that people a generation ago were able to take for granted. One can resist identificatory practices on the internet or one can negotiate with them; anonymous stands for resistance, though not always successfully. (I would love to read a book about how privacy/reputation worked before the industrial age, how that changed as Westerners started moving away from their birth locations more, and what we can learn from past experiences.) ( )